Liz Smith and Pat Buckley

by Editor
November 16, 2017 at 10:47 am

http://www.smartertimes.com/1573/liz-smith-and-pat-buckley

A nasty piece in the Times by Jonah Engel Bromwich runs under the headline "Liz Smith's Complicated Relationship With the Closet." It posthumously faults a journalist for being what the Times deems to be insufficiently public about her sexual orientation. Mr. Bromwich writes:

At the height of her influence, in the 1980s and early '90s, Ms. Smith covered for still-closeted celebrities like Malcolm Forbes and promoted conservative socialites like Pat Buckley, whose husband, William F. Buckley Jr., the editor of National Review, had written that people with AIDS should be tattooed.

For those reasons, she came under fire by the columnist Michelangelo Signorile, who during the run of the magazine OutWeek named and shamed closeted gay celebrities whom he saw as hypocrites in the midst of a deadly pandemic.

The Times doesn't say so in the article (there is a hyperlink in the online version), but where did William F. Buckley Jr. make that tattoo suggestion? In a March 1986 op-ed in the Times itself.

It's a strange kind of sexism to suggest that a gossip columnist should have somehow punished or ostracized a woman as retribution for a piece of her husband's political writing. It's even stranger to suggest that the punishment should apply because of an article that was published in the Times itself. The tattoo proposal, which I am not endorsing here, appears to have been motivated not out of any sort of anti-gay animus but rather out of concern to stop the spread of the disease.

Mr. Bromwich graduated from college in 2011, according to his LinkedIn profile; William F. Buckley Jr. died in 2008.

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